A Robotic Traffic Simulator for Teaching of Advanced Control Methods

This paper presents a development and educational application of robotic traffic simulator. Setup presented in his work consists of ten laboratory-scale vehicles designed for simulations of various traffic situations as well as the evaluation of advanced control scenarios. These can be the control of traffic fluency, such as congestion movement, vehicle group acceleration, breaking, obstacle avoidance and other situations known from everyday traffic. Further, the paper describes the technical realization of simulator from both, the hardware and software point of view. Moreover, the applicability of solution is discussed over the various situations, which can be solved in educational as well as the scientific matter. The educational value of developed traffic simulator is demonstrated on the case study, where an optimal control strategy using the Model Predictive Control was designed and evaluated by a master’s degree student.